People From Sicily

"For some time now, the Constitution has been under attack in some fundamental areas. The autonomy and independence of the judiciary has been under constant siege for years, as has the principle of equality. Article 3 of the Constitution, thanks in part to an upright judiciary, has not remained an abstract principle. All the most recent bills, however, aim to create a two-tiered justice system: efficient and harsh with the weak, soft and sluggish with the powerful. A justice system that ensures impunity for the powerful."

"(About the law on the so-called “short trial”) Should be defined as: the law of the short death of trials. It is right to ensure speedy trials, but here we have a trial that remains long and only sets a maximum time limit that can never be met. We need a reform of the justice system that shortens the timeframes but gives the judiciary human and operational resources and funding. There are 30 percent shortages in the public prosecutor's offices in Palermo and Catania, cuts in funding for overtime for staff and court clerks. Hearings are only held in the morning. At full speed, the timeframes would be halved."

"La scelta vegana è rivoluzionaria, è un atto d’amore quotidiano verso animali e persone."

"Physical death, so much a preoccupation in the death world, is less mortifying than what is peddled as life."

"The reduction of class war to a mere military confrontation carries within it the logical conclusion that, if we undergo a military defeat on this terrain, the class war ceases to exist as such. From this we come to the not just theoretical but practical absurdity that in Italy today, after the defeat of the combatant organizations, there is no longer an actual class war."

"We are all responsible for our dream of storming the heavens. We cannot turn ourselves into dwarves now, after having dreamed, elbow to elbow, each feeling the others' heartbeats, of attacking and overthrowing the gods. This is the dream that makes power afraid."

"We insistently reaffirm that the use of organized violence against exploiters, even if it takes the form of minoritarian and limited action, is an indispensable instrument in the anarchist struggle against exploitation."

"Let’s be done with waiting, doubts, dreams of social peace, little compromises and naivety. All metaphorical rubbish supplied to us in the shops of capitalism. Let’s put aside the great analyses that explain everything down to the most minute detail. Huge volumes filled with common sense and fear. Let’s put aside democratic and bourgeois illusions of discussion and dialogue, debate and assembly and the enlightened capabilities of the Mafiosi bosses. Let’s put aside the wisdom that the bourgeois work ethic has dug into our hearts. Let’s put aside the centuries of Christianity that have educated us to sacrifice and obedience. Let’s put aside priests, bosses, revolutionary leaders, less revolutionary ones and those who aren’t revolutionary at all. Let’s put aside numbers, illusions of quantity, the laws of the market. Let us sit for a moment on the ruins of the history of the persecuted, and reflect."

"Joy is arming itself. Its attack is overcoming the commodity hallucination, machinery, vengeance, the leader, the party, quantity. Its struggle is breaking down the logic of profit, the architecture of the market, the programming of life, the last document in the last archive. Its violent explosion is overturning the order of dependency, the nomenclature of positive and negative, the code of the commodity illusion."

"The neutralisation of the individual is a constant practice in capital’s reified totality. The flattening of opinions is a therapeutic process, a death machine. Production cannot take place without this flattening in the spectacular form of capitalism."

"When we say the time is not ripe for an armed attack on the State we are pushing open the doors of the mental asylum for the comrades who are carrying out such attacks; when we say it is not the time for revolution we are tightening the cords of the straightjacket; when we say these actions are objectively a provocation we don the white coats of the torturers."

"When the whole of reality is spectacular, to refuse the spectacle means to be outside reality. Anyone who refuses the code of commodities is mad. Refusal to bow down before the commodity god will result in one’s being committed to a mental asylum."

"In order to break out of the magic circle of the theatricals of commodities we must refuse all roles, including that of the ‘professional’ revolutionary."

"The way capital is physically organised at the present time makes it vulnerable to any revolutionary structure capable of deciding its own timing and means of attack."

"Capital accepts the clash in the quantitative field, because that is where it knows all the answers."

"We aren’t afraid, just stupidly full of prefabricated ideas we cannot break free from."

"Courts and sentences are always part of the spectacle of capital, even when it is revolutionaries who act them out."

"Hurry comrade, shoot the policeman, the judge, the boss. Now, before a new police prevent you.Hurry to say No, before the new repression convinces you that saying no is pointless, mad, and that you should accept the hospitality of the mental asylum.Hurry to attack capital before a new ideology makes it sacred to you.Hurry to refuse work before some new sophist tells you yet again that ‘work makes you free’.Hurry to play. Hurry to arm yourself"

"Play is characterised by a vital impulse that is always new, always in movement. By acting as though we are playing, we charge our action with this impulse. We free ourselves from death. Play makes us feel alive. It gives us the excitement of life. In the other model of acting we do everything as though it were a duty, as though we ‘had’ to do it."

"Many things can be done ‘playfully’ yet most of the things we do, we do very ‘seriously’ wearing the death mask we have borrowed from capital."

"The reign of capital, which denies our very existence as human beings and reduces us to ‘things’, seems very serious, methodical and disciplined. But its possessive paroxysm, its ethical rigour, its obsession with ‘doing’ all hide a great illusion: the total emptiness of the commodity spectacle, the uselessness of indefinite accumulation and the absurdity of exploitation. So the great seriousness of the world of work and productivity hides a total lack of seriousness."

"The search for joy is therefore an act of will, a firm refusal of the fixed conditions of capital and its values. The first of these refusals is that of work as a value. The search for joy can only come about through the search for play."

"No real joy can reach us from the rational mechanism of capitalist exploitation. Joy does not have fixed rules to catalogue it."

"Only joy will be uncontrollable. A force unknown to the civilised larvae that populate our era. A force that will multiply the creative impulse of the revolution a thousandfold."

"These people cannot comprehend that it would be possible to not produce any surplus value, and that one could also refuse to do so. That it is possible to assert one’s will to not produce, so struggle against both the bosses’ economic structures and the ideological ones that permeate the whole of Western thought."

"Liberation is seen as setting right a balance that has been upset by the wickedness of capitalism, not as the coming of a world of play to take the place of the world of work."

"In the illusory world of commodities, play is also an illusion. We imagine we are playing, while all we are really doing is monotonously repeating the roles assigned to us by capital."

"By abolishing the ethic of production you enter revolutionary reality directly."

"What madness the love of work is! With great scenic skill capital has succeeded in making the exploited love exploitation, the hanged man the rope and the slave his chains."

"Anyone who decides to organise my life for me can never be my comrade."

"If production is at the root of capitalist exploitation, to change the mode of production would merely change the mode of exploitation."

"Remunerated joy, weekends off or annual holidays paid by the boss is like paying to make love. It seems the same but there is something lacking."

"If I don’t feel like carrying on, given that no one can be forced to continue if they don’t feel like it, I say, ‘My friends, a man is made of flesh and blood, he can’t go on to infinity. So, if I don’t feel I can make it, what must I do? Sign a piece of paper? I don’t carry out impure actions, I don’t get comrades arrested, I’m simply making a declaration of my own desistence.’ I have always considered this to be a legitimate position, because nobody can be obliged to carry on if they don’t feel up to it. But desistence is no longer legitimate if, in order to justify it, I come out with the statement, ‘I can’t carry on because the war is over’. No, I no longer agree, because where does that lead us? To all the others both inside and outside prison for whom it isn’t true that the war is over, or for whom this concept is dubious, but end up believing it because everybody is saying so. And, desisting or not desisting, they end up reaching the same conclusion. It would be quite indecorous for me to push others to desist in order for me to justify my own personal decision to give up the struggle."

"The rebellion of the exploited is never terrorism."

"The city where I spent my childhood and adolescence was, in ancient times, the magnificent seat of King and Viceroy. And for historical reasons known and unknown, the imprint of the Baroque age had prevailed over others of more ancient and illustrious times. And that impression had been perpetuated over time, both in the appearance of things and in the character of men."

"There is nothing in his painting which Sicily cannot explain. (Leonardo Sciascia)"

"The mafia itself does not bring anything to mind. Like the homeland, the dead of Solferino. Ancient things. [...] Sciascia was a civil writer, a schoolteacher who wanted to teach us good social manners. But revisiting him today is like rereading Silvio Pellico. His function has been exhausted. We no longer need Sciascia. We need a new reflection, another Sicilian consciousness."

"Non c'è niente nella sua pittura che la Sicilia non possa spiegare."

"I have lived in other cities, often equally and sometimes richer in historical and monumental testimonies, but where time has instead walked. And yet I met other counter-reforms, other inquisitions, others great from Spain."

"And the time, stopped for centuries, had not erased the dark and tragic memory of the Inquisition and the weight of the privilege of the great men of Spain."

"Six and eighteenth century monuments, gardens, palaces with pot-bellied balconies, chapels, oratories, convents with large paintings, but above all habits, the way people move, the way of thinking and articulate words. The folk tales and even the official culture that, after all, had not gone beyond a pious enlightenment: from those places, you know, the French revolution has not passed."

"There is nothing in Bardi's painting, which can not be explained by painting. And yet there is nothing in his painting that Sicily, in comparison, can not explain: and not only in the events, in the facts, but also and above all in the way of being. And in his way of being a painter. (Leonardo Sciascia, 1967)"

"He (King Philip) wanted as many Greeks as possible to take part in the festivities in honour of the gods, and so planned brilliant musical contests and lavish banquets for his friends and guests. Out of all Greece he summoned his personal guest-friends and ordered the members of his court to bring along as many as they could of their acquaintances from abroad."

"Every seat in the theater was taken when Philip appeared wearing a white cloak and by his express orders his bodyguard held away from him and followed only at a distance, since he wanted to show publicly that he was protected by the goodwill of all the Greeks, and had no need of a guard of spearmen."

"Such was the end of Philip (II, king of Macedonia) ...He had ruled 24 years. He is known to fame as one who with but the slenderest resources to support his claim to a throne won for himself the greatest empire among the Hellenes (Greeks), while the growth of his position was not due so much to his prowess in arms as to his adroitness and cordiality in diplomacy."

"After this Alexander left Dareius's mother, his daughters, and his son in Susa, providing them with persons to teach them the Greek language, and marching on with his army on the fourth day reached the Tigris River."

"Alexander observed that his soldiers were exhausted with their constant campaigns. … The hooves of the horses had been worn thin by steady marching. The arms and armour were wearing out, and the Greek clothing was quite gone. They had to clothe themselves in materials of the barbarians,..."

"I have to go, but I can't explain the reasons of my choice to you. At this moment things are testifying against me. I fight for cause that can't be understood at this time, but one day people will see that I stood on the side of what is right."